The Khazars flourished from the seventh to the eleventh century. This means that they emerged following the reign of the emperor Justinian discussed elsewhere on this site. The issues surrounding the reign of Justinian, recorded by Procopius, indicate to us that something very strange was going on during that period of history. In 1998, “Us in the Future” made a comment about this that was only later confirmed scientifically which again, I cannot resist including for its historical interest:

Q: (L) I have discovered that three of the supernovas of antiquity which have been discovered and time estimated by the remnants, occurred in or near Cassiopeia at very interesting points in history.
A: Yes…
Q: (L) Well, one of these periods in history was around 1054. This is a very interesting time. It just so happens that there are no European records of this supernova which was recorded by the Chinese, Japanese, and perhaps even the Koreans. Yet, there are no European records. What happened to the European records?
A: Europe was in a “recovery mode” at the “time.”
Q: (L) Recovery from what?
A: Loss of civilized structure due to overhead cometary explosion in 564 AD.
Q: (L) What effect did this have on the civilized structure? Was it a direct effect in terms of material, or did it have effects on people causing them to behave in an uncivilized and barbaric way?
A: Well, the burning fragmentary shower ignited much of the land areas in what you now refer to as Western Europe. This had the results you can imagine, causing the resulting societal breakdown you now refer to as “The Dark Ages.”
Q: (L) Well, it damn sure was dark. There is almost a thousand years that nobody knows anything about!
A: Check Irish or Celtic, and French or Gallic records of the era for clues. There were temporary “islands of survival,” lasting just long enough for the written word to eke out.

A year later, August 17, 1999, the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau published an article by Robert S. Boyd entitled: Comets may have caused Earth’s great empires to fall which included the following: (emphases, mine)

Recent scientific discoveries are shedding new light on why great empires such as Egypt, Babylon and Rome fell apart, giving way to the periodic “dark ages” that punctuate human history. At least five times during the last 6,000 years, major environmental calamities undermined civilizations around the world.

Some researchers say these disasters appear to be linked to collisions with comets or fragments of comets such as the one that broke apart and smashed spectacularly into Jupiter five years ago.

The impacts, yielding many megatons of explosive energy, produced vast clouds of smoke and dust that circled the globe for years, dimming the sun, driving down temperatures and sowing hunger, disease and death.

The last such global crisis occurred between AD 530 and 540– at the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe — when Earth was pummeled by a swarm of cosmic debris.

In a forthcoming book, Catastrophe, the Day the Sun Went Out, British historian David Keys describes a 2-year-long winter that began in AD 535. Trees from California to Ireland to Siberia stopped growing. Crops failed. Plague and famine decimated Italy, China and the Middle East.

Keys quotes the writings of a 6th-century Syrian bishop, John of Ephesus:

“The sun became dark. … Each day it shone for about four hours and still this light was only a feeble shadow.”

A contemporary Italian historian, Flavius Cassiodorus, wrote:

“We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon. We have summer without heat.”

Analysis of tree rings shows that at in 540 AD in different parts of the world the climate changed. Temperatures dropped enough to hinder the growth of trees as widely dispersed as northern Europe, Siberia, western North America, and southern South America.

A search of historical records and mythical stories pointed to a disastrous visitation from the sky during the same period, it is claimed. There was one reference to a “comet in Gaul so vast that the whole sky seemed on fire” in 540-41.

According to legend, King Arthur died around this time, and Celtic myths associated with Arthur hinted at bright sky Gods and bolts of fire.

In the 530s, an unusual meteor shower was recorded by both Mediterranean and Chinese observers. Meteors are caused by the fine dust from comets burning up in the atmosphere. Furthermore, a team of astronomers from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland published research in 1990 which said the Earth would have been at risk from cometary bombardment between the years 400 and 600 AD. […]

Famine followed the crop failures, and hard on its heels bubonic plague that swept across Europe in the mid-6th century. […]

At this time, the Roman emperor Justinian was attempting to regenerate the decaying Roman empire. But the plan failed in 540 and was followed by the Dark Ages and the rise of Islam.

Apparently, this disaster was also followed by the arrival of the Khazars.

The kingdom of the Khazars has vanished from the map of the world and today many people have never even heard of it. But, in its day the Khazar kingdom [Khazaria] was a major power.

The Byzantine Emperor and historian, Constantine Porphyrogenitus (913-959) recorded in a treatise on Court Protocol that letters addressed to the pope in Rome, and similarly those to the Emperor of the West, had a gold seal worth two solidi attached to them, whereas messages to the King of the Khazars required a seal worth three solidi.

In other words, it was clearly understood that the Khazars were more powerful than the Emperor of the West or the Pope. As Koestler commented, “This was not flattery, but Realpolitik.” How can it be that we are taught about the Byzantine Empire and the rise of the power of the Popes of the Western Empire, and have so little knowledge of an empire that existed at the same time, that was obviously more powerful than either of them? A Jewish empire, in fact?

The country of the Khazars was strategically located at the gateway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, acting as a buffer protecting Byzantium against invasions by the barbarian Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, and later the Vikings and Russians. More important than this was the fact that the Khazars also blocked the Arabs from Eastern Europe.

Within a few years of the death of Muhammad (AD 632) the armies of the Caliphate, sweeping northward through the wreckage of two empires and carrying all before them, reached the great mountain barrier of the Caucasus. This barrier once passed, the road lay open to the lands of eastern Europe. As it was, on the line of the Caucasus the Arabs met the forces of an organized military power which effectively prevented them from extending their conquests in this direction. The wars of the Arabs and the Khazars, which lasted more than a hundred years, though little known, have thus considerable historical importance. [Professor Dunlop of Columbia University, authority on the Khazars, quoted by Koestler, p. 14]

Most people know that the Frankish army of Charles Martel turned back the Arabs on the field of Tours. Few people know that, at the same time, the Muslims were met and held by the forces of the Khazar kingdom.

In 732, the future emperor, Constantine V, married a Khazar princess and their son became Emperor Leo IV, known as Leo the Khazar.

A few years later, probably in AD 740, the King of the Khazars, his court and the military ruling class embraced the Jewish faith and Judaism became the state religion of the Khazars. This came about as a reaction against the political pressure of the other two Superpowers of the day – Byzantium and the Muslims – both of which had the advantage of a monotheistic State Religion which allowed them greater control over their subjects. Not wanting to be subject either to the Pope or the Byzantine Emperor, but seeing the political benefits of religious controls, Judaism was chosen.

The Khazar kingdom held its power and position for most of four centuries during which time they were transformed from a tribe of nomadic warriors into a nation of farmers, cattle-breeders, fishermen, viticulturists, traders and craftsmen. Soviet archaeologists have found evidence of advanced civilization with houses built in a circular shape at the lower levels, later being replaced by rectangular buildings. This is explained as evidence of the transition from from portable, dome shaped tents, to settled lifestyles.

At the peak of their power, the Khazars controlled and/or received tribute from thirty or so different nations and tribes spread across the territories between the Caucasus, the Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains, the town of Kiev, and the Ukrainian steppes. These peoples included the Bulgars, Burtas, Ghuzz, Magyars, the Gothic and Greek colonies of the Crimea, and the Slavonic tribes to the Northwest.

Until the ninth century, the Khazars had no rivals to their supremacy in the regions north of the Black Sea and the adjoining steppe and the forest regions of the Dnieper. The Khazars were the supreme masters of the southern half of Eastern Europe for a century and a half. […] During this whole period, they held back the onslaught of the nomadic tribes from the East. [Soviet archaeologist M. I. Artamonov]

In the timeline of history, the Khazar empire existed between the Huns and the Mongols. The Arab chroniclers wrote that the Khazars were “white, their eyes blue, their hair flowing and predominantly reddish, their bodies large, and their natures cold. Their general aspect is wild.”

The Georgians and Armenians, having been repeatedly devastated by the Khazars, identified them as Gog and Magog. An Armenian writer described them as having “insolent, broad, lashless faces and long falling hair, like women.”

They sound like the long-haired Franks, don’t they?

One of the earliest factual references to the Khazars occurs in a Syriac chronicle dating from the middle of the sixth century. It mentions the Khazars in a list of people who inhabit the region of the Caucasus. Koestler recounts that other sources indicate that the Khazars were intimately connected with the Huns.

In AD 448, the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II sent an embassy to Attila which included a famed rhetorician by name of Priscus. He kept a minute account not only of the diplomatic negotiations, but also of the court intrigues and goings-on in Attila’s sumptuous banqueting hall – he was in fact the perfect gossip columnist, and is still one of the main sources of information about Hun customs and habits. But Priscus also has anecdotes to tell about a people subject to the Huns whom he calls Akatzirs – that is, very likely, the Ak-Khazars, or “White” Khazars.

The Byzantine Emperor, Priscus tells us, tried to win this warrior race over to his side, but the greedy Khazar chieftain named Karidach, considered the bribe offered to him inadequate, and sided with the Huns. Attila defeated Karidach’s rival chieftains, installed him as the sole ruler of the Akatzirs, and invited him to visit his court. Karidach thanked him profusely for the invitation and went on to say that “it would be too hard on a mortal man to look into the face of a god. For, as one cannot stare into the sun’s disc, even less could one look into the face of the greatest god without suffering injury.” Attila must have been pleased, for he confirmed Karidach in his rule.

After the collapse of the Hun Empire, the Khazars raided and absorbed numerous tribes of nomadic hordes coming from the East. At this point, the West Turkish kingdom arose, a confederation of tribes ruled by a Kagan, or Khagan. The Khazars later adopted this title for their rulers as well. This “Turkish state” fell apart after a century, but it is important to note that it was only after this period that the word Turkish was used in reference to a specific nation, as opposed to its earlier use which simply meant a tribe speaking a Turkic language such as the Khazars and Bulgars.

And so, at the time of the cometary disasters that brought on the Dark Ages, the Khazars rose to power. By the first decades of the seventh century, there were three “Superpowers,” two of whom had been fighting each other for a century and were seemingly on the verge of collapse. Persia was about to face its doom in the armies of the Khazars, but through its friendship with Khazaria, Byzantium survived.

In 627, the Roman Emperor Heraclius made an alliance with the Khazars so as to defeat his nemesis: Persia. The Khazars provided Heraclius with 40,000 horsemen under a commander named Ziebel and Heraclius promised him his daughter.

The Persians were defeated, which was followed by a revolution and after ten years of anarchy and chaos, the first Arab armies delivered the coup de grace. And so, a new Superpower arose: the Islamic Caliphate.

In short order, the Muslims conquered Persia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and surrounded the Byzantine empire in a half-circle from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus. Between 642 and 652, the Muslims repeatedly penetrated into Khazaria in an attempt to gain a foothold on the way to Eastern Europe. After a defeat in 652, the Muslims backed off for thirty or forty years and concentrated on Byzantium, laying siege to Constantinople on several occasions. Had they been able to get to the other side, to surround Byzantium from the Khazarian side, it would have been fatal for the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile, the Khazars consolidated their own power, expanding into Ukraine and the Crimea, incorporating the conquered people into their empire ruled by the Kagan. By the time of the 8th century, the Khazar empire was stable enough to actually go on the offensive against the Muslims rather than just holding their position and driving them away repeatedly.

From a distance of more than a thousand years, the period of intermittent warfare that followed looks like a series of tedious episodes on a local scale, following the same, repetitive pattern: the Khazar cavalry in their heavy armour breaking through the pass of Dariel or the Gate of Darband into the Caliph’s domains to the south; followed by Arab counter-thrusts through the same pass or the defile, towards the Volga and back again. […] One is reminded of the old jingle about the noble Duke of York who had ten thousand men; “he marched them up to the top of the hill. And he marched them down again.” In fact, the Arab sources speak of armies of 100,000, even of 300,000 men engaged on either side – probably outnumbering the armies which decided the fate of the Western world at the battle of Tours about the same time.

The death-defying fanaticism which characterized these wars is illustrated by episodes such as the suicide by fire of a whole Khazar town as an alternative to surrender; the poisoning of the water supply of Bab al Abwab by an Arab general; or by the traditional exhortation which would halt the rout of a defeated Arab army and make it fight to the last man: “To the Garden Muslims, not the Fire” – the joys of Paradise being assured to every Muslim soldier killed in the Holy War.[Koestler, p. 28]

The giant Islamic pincer movement across the Pyrenees in the west and across the Caucasus into Eastern Europe was halted at both ends about the same time. As Charles Martel’s Franks saved Gaul and Western Europe, so the Khazars saved the Eastern Roman Empire.

At the end of all this was the marriage of the Khazar princess to the heir of the Byzantine Empire in gratitude for defeat of the Muslims. Following this event, of course, was the politically expedient conversion of the Khazars to Judaism.

Overnight an entire group of people, the warlike, fanatical Khazars, suddenly proclaimed themselves Jews. The Khazar kingdom began to be described as the “Kingdom of the Jews” by historians of the day. Succeeding Khazar rulers took Jewish names, sent for Jewish scholars from Spain to come and instruct them, settle with them. During the late 9th Century the Khazar kingdom became a haven for Jews of other lands. But it seems that this process was almost exclusively a question of male Jews – including Kohanim – coming to Khazaria and marrying Khazar women. What does not seem to have happened, is the intermarriage of Khazars with Separdic Jewish women from other European communities of Jews.

Koestler quotes at length from ancient accounts of the Khazars and I highly recommend this book to the reader not only because it is well researched, but also because it can be quite entertaining reading!

At the height of the Khazar empire, the main source of royal income was foreign trade. There were enormous caravans that transported textiles, dried fruit, honey, wax, and spices following the Silk road to and from the East. Arts and crafts and haute couture flourished. Slaves and furs were traded by Rus merchants, Vikings coming down the Volga on a north/south trade axis. On all these goods, the Khazars levied a tax of ten per cent. This was added to the tribute paid by the Bulgars, Magyars, and others. Khazaria was cosmopolitan, open to all sorts of cultural and religious influences while, at the same time, using its State Religion to defend itself against the other two ecclesiastical powers in the world.

In short, Khazaria was an extremely prosperous country and this prosperity depended on its military power. Khazaria had a standing army by which means it was able to maintain brutal domination over its subject tribes and peoples. Human sacrifice was also practiced by the earlier Khazars- including the ritual killing of the king at the end of his reign.

At the beginning of the ninth century, the Khazars had more or less a tacit “nonaggression pact” with the Caliphate, and relations with Byzantium were friendly. After all, they were family! But, a new cloud was on the horizon: the Vikings began to stir.

Two centuries earlier, it had been the Arabs and their “Holy War.” Now it was the Vikings and their “unholy war” of piracy and plunder.

In neither case have historians been able to provide convincing explanations of the economical, ecological or ideological reasons which transformed these apparently quiescent regions of Arabia and Scandinavia quasi overnight into volcanoes of exuberant vitality and reckless enterprise. Both eruptions spent their force within a couple of centuries but left a permanent mark on the world. Both evolved in this time-span from savagery and destructiveness to splendid cultural achievement. [Koestler, p. 86]

Within a few decades, the Vikings had penetrated all the major waterways of Europe, conquered half of Ireland, colonized Iceland, conquered Normandy, sacked Paris, raided Germany, the Rhone delta, the gulf of Genoa, circumnavigated the Iberian peninsula and attacked Constantinople through the Mediterranean and the Dardanelles, coordinated with an attack down the Dnieper and across the Black Sea. A special prayer was formulated in Christendom: Lord deliver us from the fury of the Normans.

Again, Byzantium depended on Khazaria to block the advance of the Vikings.

This branch of norsemen who were called Rhos or Varangians, originated from eastern Sweden and were cousins to the Norwegians and Danes who raided Western Europe.

These Varangian-Rus seem to have been a unique blend – unique even among their brother Vikings – combining the traits of pirates, robbers and meretricious merchants, who traded on their own terms, imposed by sword and battle-axe. They bartered furs, swords and amber in exchange for gold, but their principal merchandise were slaves. [Koestler, p. 89]

For a century and a half, trade and diplomacy between the Byzantines and the Khazars and the Rus alternated with war. Slowly but surely, the Vikings built permanent settlements, becoming Slavonized by intermingling with their subjects and vassals – the Slavs along the Dnieper who were agricultural and more timid than the “Turks.” This mixing of genes and cultures tamed the Rus and turned them into Russians.

At first, the Rus were friendlier with the Khazars than with the Byzantines. The Rus even adopted the title “Kagan” for their ruler. However, all the while they were having “cultural exchanges” with the Khazars, the Rus were bringing the Slavs into their own fold. Considering the genetic data, this may be as much due to intermarriage between the Slavonic tribes, as much as to conquest. Within a couple of decades, the Rus were receiving tribute from almost half of the former subjects of the Khazars!

When the town of Kiev, on the Dnieper river, passed into Rus hands, apparently without an armed struggle, it was the beginning of the end for Khazaria. There were still large communities of Khazar Jews in Kiev, and later, after the final destruction of Khazaria, they were joined by Khazar refugees.

A tribe called the Magyars now come into view. The Magyars seem to have originated in the forest regions of the northern Urals along with two other tribes, the Vogul and Ostyak. Probably at the time of the cometary bombardment that brought on the dark ages, these tribes were driven out of their forests and the Magyars, attached themselves as willing vassals to first the Huns and then the Khazars. There is no record of a single armed conflict between the Khazars and Magyars. Toynbee says that the Magyars “took tribute” on the Khazars’ behalf from the Slav and Finn peoples.

At the time of the arrival of the Rus, the Magyars moved across the Don river to its West bank. One might assume, by the fact that they were allies of the Khazars, that they did this with the full permission of the Khazars and that it was intended to act as a check against the advancement of the Rus.

The Khazars compensated the Magyars for their loyalty by giving them a king, the founder of the first Magyar dynasty and then, they did something that they apparently had not done up to this point: intermarriage between the Magyars and several Khazar tribes took place. The Khazar Kagan gave a noble Khazar lady to the new king of the Magyars for his wife. There were no children of this union, but it is assumed that there were marriages between her retainers and the members of the Magyar court.

At some point during this period, there also seems to have been a rebellion of three Khazar tribes some of whom fled to the Magyars. As Koestler puts it: the Magyars received metaphorically and literally, a blood transfusion from the Khazars.

Until the middle of the tenth century, both the Magyar and Khazar languages were spoken in Hungary. The result of this double tongue is the mixed character of the modern Hungarian language. Though the Hungarians have ceased to be bilingual, there are still some two hundred loan-words from the Chuvash dialect of Turkish which the Khazars spoke.

There is some evidence to indicate that among the dissident Khazar tribes (the leading one was called Kabar), who de facto took over the leadership of the Magyar tribes, there were Jews, or adherents of a “judaizing religion.” Some experts think that this rebellion was, in fact, connected with the religious reforms initiated by King Obadiah of the Khazars. Rabbinical law, strict rules, and other elements of Judaism would certainly have grated on a tribe of steppe warriors.

The alliance of the Magyars and Khazars came to an end when the Magyars crossed the Carpathian mountains and conquered the territory that was to become Hungary. Thus, in 862, they raided the East Frankish empire.

The Magyars seem to have acquired the raiding habit only in the second half of the ninth century – about the time when they received that critical blood-transfusion from the Khazars. The Kabars … became the leading tribe, and infused their hosts with the spirit of adventure which was soon to turn them into the scourge of Europe, as the Huns had earlier been. They also taught the Magyars “those very peculiar and characteristic tactics employed since time immemorial by every Turkish nation – Huns, Avars, Turks, Pechenegs, Kumans – and by no other … light cavalry using the old devices of simulated flight, of shooting while fleeing, of sudden charges with fearful, wolf-like howling.” [Koestler, p. 103]

In other words: “By way of deception, thou shalt do war…”

Thus, the Khazars were instrumental in establishing the Hungarian state. In the tenth century, the Hungarian Duke Taksony invited an unknown number of Khazars to settle in his domains. It is not unlikely that these Khazars were Jews. Steve Jones writes in In the Blood: God, Genes, and Destiny:

Ashkenazim are quite distinct from their Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern co-religionists in the incidence of the disease and in the mutations responsible…

The genetic family tree of Jews from different parts of Europe shows that they are not a unique group, biologically distinct from other peoples around them. There is, though, evidence of common ancestry that gives Jews at least a partial identity of their own. In most places, there is overlap between the genes of the Jewish population and those of local non-Jews. There has been interchange; sometimes through recent marriage, but more often as a result of mating long ago….

The Y chromosomes of Jews are – unsurprisingly – not all the same; the idea of the sons of Abraham is a symbolic one. They do show that many males, some only distantly related to each other, have contributed to the genes of European Jewry. On the average, most Jewish populations contain more diversity for male lineages than for female (whose history is recorded in mitochondrial DNA). This means that there has been more invasion of the Jewish gene pool by the genes of non-Jewish men than of women. The Y chromosomes of Jewish men from the Balkans are rather unlike those of other European Jews, perhaps because there was more admixture in this unstable part of the world.”

Judit Beres and C. R. Guglielmino write in: Genetic Structure in relation to the history of the Hungarian ethnic group.

Magyars, Jews, Gypsies, Germans, Slovaks, Kuns, Romanians, etc. In this very large study, Hungarian Jews were found to be highly distinct from all other groups residing in Hungary. [ Human Biology 68:3 (June 1996): 335- 356]

In another article on this website, I speculated about the “Secret Controllers” of our present world:

At the turn of the century bankers, merchants, industrialists, artists, and intellectuals thronged the broad boulevards that ring [Budapest] or rode beneath them in Europe’s first subway. Between 1890 and 1900 the population of Budapest had increased by more than 40 percent to over three-quarters of a million souls, making it the sixth largest city in Europe. Because of Budapest’s lively cafes, boulevards, parks, and financial exchange, visitors called it the “Little Paris on the Danube.” What would not become apparent for years was that while the cares were doing a booming business, the maternity wards of Budapest were churning out [Jewish] geniuses like a Ford assembly line.

Hungary’s economic and intellectual flowering began with the Ausgleich of 1867, which established the dual monarchy with Austria. Under that agreement Hungary achieved something approaching independence from Austria; the Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With astonishing rapidity the engines of the industrial age and capitalism would transform Hungary. “The operators of those mechanisms,” writes historian Richard Rhodes, “by virtue of their superior ambition and energy, but also by default, were Jews.”

Shortly after the establishment of the dual monarchy, discriminatory laws against Jews were repealed, opening to them all civic and political functions. The surge of Jewish immigration followed, paralleling the contemporaneous flood of Jewish immigrants from Russia to New York City.

Political power remained in the hands of the nobility, whose indifference to the gentile non-Hungarian minorities – nearly half the population – would keep a third of the gentiles illiterate as late as 1918, and most of them tied to the land. The Hungarian nobility, unwilling to dirty its hands on commerce, found allies in the Jews. By 1904 Hungarian Jews, who comprised about 5 percent of the population, accounted for about half of Hungary’s lawyers and commercial businessmen, 60 percent of its doctors, and 80 percent of its financiers. Budapest Jews were also a dominant presence in the artistic, literary, musical, and scientific life of the country, which caused the growing anti-Semitic community to coin the derogatory label “Judapest.”

The growing anti-Semitism would in later years cause many of the brightest members of the Hungarian Jewish community to flee their country. Some of the leading scientists and mathematicians, whose ideas and inventions would help form this century, were part of this tide of immigration. Among the better known were Leo Szilard, who was the first person to understand how chain reactions can unleash the power of the atom; John von Neumann, inventor of the electronic computer and game theory; and Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. Less well known outside the world of science but equally influential were Theodor von Karman, the father of supersonic flight; George de Hevesy who received a Nobel Prize for his invention of the technique of using radioactive tracers that has had a revolutionary impact on virtually every field of science; and Eugene Wigner, whose exploration of the foundations of quantum mechanics earned him a Nobel Prize.

The list of the great Hungarian scientists could be extended almost indefinitely, but even outside the sciences the prominence of Hungarians is extraordinary. In music it would include the conductors Georg Solti, George Szell, Fritz Reiner, Antal Dorati, and Eugene Ormandy, and the composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly. Hungarian visual arts in this century were dominated by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who founded the Chicago Institute of Design. Holly wood was even more influenced by the Magyar emigration. Movie moguls William Fox and Adolph Zukor were Budapest-born, as were Alexander Korda and his brothers, Vincent and Theodor, the director George Cukor, and the producer of Casablanca, Michael Curtisz. And of course, Zsa Zsa Gabor and her sisters were Hungarian, as were Paul Lukas and Erich Weiss, better known as Harry Houdini.

Trying to account for what the physicist Otto Frisch called the “galaxy of brilliant Hungarian expatriates,” is a favorite activity in scientific circles. The leading theory, attributed to the theoretical physicist Fritz Houtermans, is that “these people are really from Mars.” Andrew Vazxonyi offers a particularly charming version of the extraterrestrial theory. “Well, at the beginning of the century,” he says quite seriously, but with a twinkle in his eye, “some people from outer space landed on earth. They thought that the Hungarian women were the best-looking of all, and they took on the form of humans, and after a few years, they decided the Earth was not worth colonizing, so they left. Soon afterward this bunch of geniuses was born. That’s the true story.”

The actual explanation for Hungary’s outpouring of genius is hard to find. Chance certainly played a role. But the strong intellectual values of the Jewish bourgeoisie, combined with the excellent Hungarian educational system, were the fertile field in which the random seeds of genetic chance could flourish. [My Brain is Open, Bruce Schecter, 1998, Touchstone, New York]

Jews have indeed made positive contributions to Western culture in the last 200 years. But whatever one might think are the unique and irreplaceable Jewish contributions to the post-Enlightenment world, it is naive to suppose they were intended for the purpose of benefiting humanity solely or even primarily.

I would like to point out that the list of Jewish scientific achievements from the quote above include atomic bombs and Game Theory. Jewish led Science has indeed exploded – no pun intended – and it has brought mankind to the edge of self-destruction. Advances in mathematical, physical and computer sciences have brought about “applied game theory”, where “wars” are called “games”, and to “win the game” is to kill as many people as possible with as little cost as possible.

Now, back to the Rus. At the same point in time when the Magyars went across the Carpathians, thus depriving the Khazars of their protection in the buffer zone, taking many Jews with them, the Rus took over Kiev in a bloodless coup. There is a reason that they were able to do this.

Three years earlier, the Byzantine emperor set out against the Saracens. He hadn’t been gone long when a messenger came to tell him to turn around and return to Constantinople as soon as possible because 200 Russian ships had entered the Bosporus from the Black Sea and were sacking the suburbs of the city. This attack had been coordinated with a simultaneous attack of a western Viking fleet approaching Constantinople across the Mediterranean. The master mind behind this almost capture of Constantinople was Rurik of Novgorod AKA Rorik of Jutland.

The Byzantines now realized what they were up against and, as Koestler notes, decided to play the double game. Treaties were signed in 860 and 866. Scandinavian sailors were recruited into the Byzantine fleet and the famous Varangian Guard was formed. Later treaties in 945 and 971, led to the Principality of Kiev supplying the Byzantine Emperor with troops on request. In 957, Princess Olga of Kiev was baptized on her state visit to Constantinople.

In 988, during the reign of St. Vladimir, the ruling dynasty of the Russians finally and definitively adopted Christianity via the Greek Orthodox Church.

At about the same time, the Hungarians, Poles and Scandinavians converted to Roman Catholicism. The lines of religious division were being drawn across the world. With new alliances and new enemies, the Khazars were, it seems no longer needed. Now the taxes they charged on all the commerce between Russia and Byzantine and the West and the East became a burden no longer to be borne. The Byzantines sacrificed the Khazar alliance in favor of a Russian détente.

The destruction of the capital city of Khazaria, Sarkel, by Svyatoslav of Kiev in 965, was the end of the Khazar empire though the state continued.

In 1016, a combined Russian-Byzantine army invaded Khazaria, defeated its ruler and “subdued the country.”

The Russians were unable to hold against the tide of nomad warriors from the Steppes. The constant pressure pushed the center of Russian power north and Kiev went into decline. Independent principalities arose and fell, creating chaos and endless war. Into this vacuum rode the Ghuzz, “pagan and godless foes” also known as Polovtsi, Kumans, Kun or Kipchaks. They ruled the steppes from the late 11th to the thirteenth century when they were overrun by the Mongols.

The Eastern Steppes were plunged into darkness and the later history of the Khazars is shrouded in obscurity. Arab chroniclers speak of a temporary exodus of the population to the Caspian shore, but later returned with the aid of the Muslim Shah of Shirwan. More than one source speaks of this exodus, and then return with the aid of the Muslims, but that the price for this help was conversion.

The first non-Arab mention of Khazaria after 965 is a travel report by Ibrahim Ibn Jakub, the Spanish-Jewish ambassador to Otto the Great. He described the Khazars as still flourishing in 973. The Russian Chronicles give an account of Jews from Khazaria arriving in Kiev in 986.

A later mention, in the Russian Chronicle for the year 1023, mentions Prince Mtislav marching against his brother prince Yaroslav with a force of Khazars and Kasogians. Seven years later, a Khazar army is reported to have defeated a Kurdish invading force.

In 1079, the Russian Chronicle says”The Khazars of Tmutorakan took Oleg prisoner and shipped him overseas to Tsargrad (Constantinople.) Four years later, Oleg was allowed to return to Tmutorakan where “he slaughtered the Khazars who had counseled the death of his brother and had plotted against himself.”

Around AD 1100, the Christian saint, Eustratius was a prisoner in Cherson, in the Crimea, and was ill-treated by his “Jewish master,” who forced ritual Passover food on him. Koestler emphasizes that the story is probably bunk, but what is important is that it takes a strong Jewish presence in the town for granted.

The last mention of the Khazars in the Russian chronicle is in 1106. About 50 years later, two Persian poets mention a joint Khazar-Rus invasion of Shirwan and speak of Dervent Khazars. At around the same time, there is a short and grumpy (Koestler’s term) remark made by the Jewish traveler, Rabbi Petachia of Regensburg who was scandalized at the lack of talmudic learning among the Khazar Jews when he crossed Khazaria.

The last mention of the Khazars as a nation is dated around 1245, at which point in time, the Mongols had already established the greatest nomad empire in the world, extending from Hungary to China. Pope Innocent IV sent a mission to Batu Khan, grandson of Jinghiz Khan, ruler of the Western part of the Mongol Empire. Franciscan friar, Joannes de Plano Carpini visited the capital of Batu Khan: Sarai Batu, AKA Saksin, AKA Itil, the former city of the Khazars.

After his return Plano Carpini wrote in his famous history a list of the regions he visited, as well as the occupants. He mentions, along with the Alans and Circassians, the “Khazars observing the Jewish religion.”

And then, darkness.

Bar Hebraeus, one of the greatest Syriac scholars, relates that the father of Seljuk, (the founder of the Seljuk Turk dynasty), Tukak, was a commander in the army of the Khazar Kagan and that Seljuk himself was brought up at the Kagan’s court. He was banned from the court for being too familiar with the Kagan.

Another source speaks of Seljuk’s father as “one of the notables of the Khazar Turks.” Thus, there seems to have been an intimate relationship between the Khazars and the founders of the Seljuk dynasty. There was an obvious break, but whether it was because of conversion to Islam, or whether conversion to Islam came about because of the break in relations, we cannot know.

Russian epics and folk tales give us a few scattered bits to consider after the expiration of the official chronicles. They speak of the “country of the Jews” and “Jewish heroes” who fought against Russians and ruled the steppes. Legends from the Middle ages circulated among Western Jews tell of a “kingdom of the Red Jews.”

The Jews of other lands were flattered by the existence of an independent Jewish state. Popular imagination found here a particularly fertile field. Just as the biblically minded Slavonic epics speak of “Jews” rather than Khazars, so did western Jews long after spin romantic tales around those “red Jews” so styled perhaps because of the slight Mongolian pigmentation of many Khazars.

In the twelfth century there arose in Khazaria a Messianic movement, a rudimentary attempt at a Jewish crusade, aimed at the conquest of Palestine by force of arms. The initiator of the movement was a Khazar Jew, one Solomon ben Duji, aided by his son Menahem and a Palestinian scribe. “They wrote letters to all the Jews, near and far, in all the lands around them … They said that the time had come in which God would gather Israel, His people from all lands to Jerusalem, the holy city, and that Solomon Ben Duji was Elijah, and his son was the Messiah.

These appeals were apparently addressed to the Jewish communities in the Middle East, and seemed to have had little effect, for the next episode takes place only about twenty years later, when young Menahem assumed the name David al-Roy, and the title of Messiah. Though the movement originated in Khazaria, its centre soon shifted to Kurdistan. Here David assembled a substantial armed force – possibly of local Jews, reinforced by Khazars – and succeeded in taking possession of the strategic fortress of Amadie, northeast of Mosul. From here he may have hoped to lead his army to Edessa, and fight his way through Syria into the Holy Land. […]

Among the Jews of the Middle East, David certainly aroused fervent Messianic hopes. One of his messages came to Baghdad and … instructed its Jewish citizens to assemble on a certain night on their flat roofs, whence they would be flown on clouds to the Messiah’s camp. A goodly number of Jews spent that night on their roofs awaiting the miraculous flight.

But the rabbinical hierarchy in Baghdad, fearing reprisals by the authorities, took a hostile attitude to the pseudo-Messiah and threatened him with a ban. Not surprisingly, David al-Roy was assassinated – apparently in his sleep, allegedly by his own father-in-law…

His memory was venerated, and when Benjamin of Tudela traveled through Persia twenty years after the event, “they still spoke lovingly of their leader.” But the cult did not stop there. According to one theory, the six-pointed “shield of David” which adorns the modern Israeli flag, stated to become a national symbol with David a- Roy’s crusade. […]

During the half millennium of its existence and its aftermath in the East European communities, this noteworthy experiment in Jewish statecraft doubtless exerted a greater influence on Jewish history than we are as yet able to envisage. […]

In general, the reduced Khazar kingdom persevered. It waged a more or less effective defence against all foes until the middle of the thirteenth century, when it fell victim to the great Mongol invasion… Even then it resisted stubbornly until the surrender of all its neighbors. Its population was largely absorbed by the Golden Horde which had established the centre of its empire in Khazar territory. But before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centres of Eastern Europe.

Here, then, we have the cradle of the numerically strongest and culturally dominant part of modern Jewry. [Koestler, pp. 135 – 137]

As Koestler remarks, this history reduces the term “anti-Semitism” to meaningless jargon based on a misapprehension shared by both the Nazi killers and their victims.

It also reduces the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the most meaningless and tragic hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

Names deceive. When one is studying the general patterns of ethnology one must remember above all that a real ethnos and an ethnonym, i.e. ethnic name, are not the same thing.

We often encounter several different ethnoi bearing one and the same name; conversely, one ethnos may be called differently. The word ‘Romans’ (romani), for instance, originally meant a citizen of the polis Rome, but not at all the Italics and not even the Latins who inhabited other towns of Latium.

In the epoch of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries A.D. the number of Romans increased through the inclusion among them of all Italians-Etruscans, Samnites, Ligurians, Gauls, and many inhabitants of the provinces, by no means of Latin origin.

After the edict of Caracalla in A.D. 212 all free inhabitants of municipalities on the territory of the Roman Empire were called ‘Romans’, i.e. Greeks, Cappadocians, Jews, Berbers, Gauls, Illyrians, Germans, etc. The concept ‘Roman’ lost its ethnic meaning, it would seem, but that was not so; it simply changed it.

The general element became unity not even of culture, but of historical fate, instead of unity of origin and language. The ethnos existed in that form for three centuries, a considerable period, and did not break up.

On the contrary, it was transformed in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., through the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, which began to be the determinant principle after the fourth ecumenical council. Those who recognized these councils sanctioned by the state authority were Romans, and those who did not became enemies.

A new ethnos was formed on that basis, that I conventionally call ‘Byzantine’, but they themselves called themselves ‘Romaic’, i.e. ‘Romans’, though they spoke Greek.

A large number of Slavs, Armenians, and Syrians were gradually merged among the Romaic, but they retained the name ‘Romans’ until 1453, until the fall of Constantinople. The Romaic considered precisely themselves ‘Romans’, but not the population of Italy, where Langobards had become feudal lords,Syrian Semites (who had settled in Italy, which had become deserted, in the first to third centuries A.D.) the townsmen, and the former colons from prisoners of war of all peoples at any time conquered by the Romans of the Empire became peasants.

Florentines, Genoese, Venetians, and other inhabitants of Italy considered themselves ‘Romans’, and not the Greeks, and on those grounds claimed the priority of Rome where only ruins remained of the antique city.

A third branch of the ethnonym ‘Romans’ arose on the Danube, which had been a place of exile after the Roman conquest of Dacia. There Phrygians, Cappadocians, Thracians, Galatians, Syrians, Greeks, Illyrians, in short, all the eastern subjects of the Roman Empire, served sentences for rebellion against Roman rule. To understand one another they conversed in the generally known Latin tongue. When the Roman legions left Dacia, the descendants of the exiled settlers remained and formed an ethnos that took the name ‘Romanian’, i.e. ‘Roman’, in the nineteenth century.

If one can treat the continuity between ‘Romans’ of the age of the Republic and the ‘Roman citizens’ of the late Empire, even as a gradual extension of the concept functionally associated with the spread of culture, there is no such link even between the Byzantines and the Romans, from which it follows that the word changed meaning and content and cannot serve as an identifying attribute of the ethnos.

It is obviously also necessary to take into consideration the context in which the word – and so the epoch – has a semantic content, because the meaning of words changes in the course of time. That is even more indicative when we analyze the ethnonyms ‘Turk’, ‘Tatar’, and ‘Mongol’, an example that cannot be left aside.

Examples of camouflage. In the sixth century A.D. a small people living on the eastern slopes of the Altai and Khangai mountains were called Turks.Through several successful wars they managed to subordinate the whole steppe from Hingan to the Sea of Azov. [The Khazars] The subjects of the Great Kaghanate, who preserved their own ethnonyms for internal use, also began to be called Turks, since they were subject to the Turkish Khan.

When the Arabs conquered Sogdiana and clashed with the nomads, they began to call all of them Turks, including the Ugro-Magyars.

In the eighteenth century European scholars called all nomads ‘les Tartars‘, and in the nineteenth century, when linguistic classification became fashionable, the name ‘Turk’ was arrogated to a definite group of languages.

Many peoples thus fell into the category ‘Turk’ who had not formed part of it in antiquity, for example the Yakuts, Chuvash and the hybrid people, the Ottoman Turks.

The modification of the ethnonym ‘Tatar’ is an example of direct camouflage.Up to the twelfth century this was the ethnic name of a group of 30 big clans inhabiting the banks of the Korulen. In the twelfth century this nationality increased in numbers, and Chinese geographers began to call all the Central Asian nomads (Turkish speaking, Tungus-speaking, and Mongol-speaking), including the Mongols, Tatars. And even when, in 1206, Genghis-khan officially called all his subjects Mongols, neighbors continued for some time from habit to call them Tatars.

In this form the word ‘Tatar’ reached Eastern Europe as a synonym of the word ‘Mongol’, and became acclimatized in the Volga Valley where the local population began, as a mark of loyalty to the Khan of the Golden Horde to call themselves Tatars. But the original bearers of this name (Kereites, Naimans, Oirats, and Tatars) began to call themselves Mongols. The names thus changed places.

Since that time a scientific terminology arose in which the Tatar anthropological type began to be called ‘Mongoloid’, and the language of the Volga Kipchak-Turks Tatar. In other words we even employ an obviously camouflaged terminology in science.

But then it is not simply a matter of confusion, but of an ethnonymic phantasmagoria. Not all the nomad subjects of the Golden Horde were loyal to its government. The rebels who lived in the steppes west of the Urals began to call themselves Nogai, and those who lived on the eastern borders of the Jochi ulus, in Tarbagatai and on the banks of the Irtysh, and who were practically independent, because of their remoteness from the capital, became the ancestors of the Kazakhs.

These ethnoi arose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a consequence of rapid mixing of various ethnic components. The ancestors of the Nogai were the Polovtsy, steppe Alans, Central Asian Turks, who survived a defeat by Batu and were taken into the Mongol army, and inhabitants of the southern frontier of Rus, who adopted Islam, which became a symbol at that time of ethnic consolidation. The Tatars included Kama Bulgars, Khazars, and Burtasy, and also some of the Polovtsy and Ugric Mishari. The population of the White Horde was the mixture; three Kazakh jus were formed from it in the fifteenth century.

But that is not yet all. At the end of the fifteenth century Russian bands from the Upper Volga began to attack the Middle Volga Tatar towns, forced some of the population to quit their homeland and go off into Central Asia under the chieftainship of Sheibani-khan (1500-1510). There they were met as fierce enemies because the local Turks who at that time bore the name of ‘Chagatai’ (after Genghis-khan’s second son Chagatei, the chief of the Central Asian ulus), were ruled by descendants of Timur, the enemy of the steppe and Volga Tatars, who ravaged the Volga Valley in 1398-1399.

The members of the horde who quit their homeland took on a new name ‘Uzbeks’ to honor the Khan Uzbeg (1312-1341), who had established Islam in the Golden Horde as the state religion. In the sixteenth century the ‘Uzbeks’ defeated Babur, the last of the Timurides, who led the remnants of his supporters into India and conquered a new kingdom for himself there.

So the Turks who remained in Samarkand and Ferghana bear the name of their conquerors, the Uzbeks. The same Turks, who went to India, began to be called ‘Moghuls’ in memory of their having been, three hundred years earlier, subject to the Mongol Empire.

But the genuine Mongols who settled in eastern Iran in the thirteenth century, and even retained their language, are called Khazareitsy from the Persian word khazar -a thousand (meaning a military unit, or division).

But where are the Mongols, by whose name the yoke that lay on Rus for 240 years is known?

They were not an ethnos, because by Genghis-khan’s will Jochi, Batu, Orda, and Sheibani each received 4 000 warriors, of whom only part came from the Far East. The latter were called ‘Kins’ and not ‘Tatars’, from the Chinese name of the Jurchen. This rare name occurred for the last time in the Zadonshchina, in which Mamai was called Kinnish.

Consequently, the yoke was not Mongol at all, but was enforced by the ancestors of the nomad Uzbeks, who should not be confused with the settled Uzbeks, although they merged in the nineteenth century, and now constitute a single ethnos, who equally revere the Timurides and the Sheibanides, who were deadly enemies in the sixteenth century, because that enmity had already lost sense and meaning in the seventeenth century.

Look again at the italicized paragraph above and then consider the comment from Michael Hammer’s paper where he says:

The much older estimated age of the factor XI type II mutation ( B3000 years), which has a high frequency in both Ashkenazi and Iraqi Jewish populations, implies that its frequency is largely independent of the recent demographic upheavals particular to the Ashkenazi population. […]

Now, with the history of the Khazars in mind, look again at the chart of relationships. It all begins to make sense, doesn’t it?

Now, I want to go back, for a moment, to my off-hand remark that the descriptions of the Khazars sound a lot like descriptions of the Franks. An Armenian writer described them as having “insolent, broad, lashless faces and long falling hair, like women.”

The fact is, nobody really knows who the Franks were or where they came from. It has been conjectured that they were barbarian tribes from the East that met and mingled with the Frisians.

The areas that the Frisians originate from was settled as early as 3500 BC. There were comings and goings of additional peoples as the archaeological records show, but it seems to be possible to systematically track who was who and who went where by their pottery and other artifacts.

During the period 400-200 BC, the archaeology shows that a group with its own identity developed from the Ems/Weser and Drenthe settlers. This group was called the Proto-Frisian culture by archaeologists. These Proto-Frisians lived in an area between modern Leiden and Delfzijl. Over the coming centuries, this group of Proto-Frisians expanded to fill the whole of the habitable region.

The coming of the Romans to the southern Netherlands in 12 BC prevented the Frisians from expanding their territory to the south of the Amstel and the Rhine. Around the year 150 BC, the Frisians also lost the Groningen salt-marshes to the Chatti who had advanced from East Friesland.

A list of place-names compiled in Alexandria by geographer Claudius Ptolameus (Ptolemy) c.150 AD was turned into maps by Europeans in the 15th century. These maps also supply the names of those tribes dwelling along the North Sea coastal regions. The evidence indicates that Saxons lived in southwest Jutland (Ribe and southwards), North Friesland and Ditmarschen – as far as the Elbe. Between the Elbe and the Weser lived the “greater” Chatti, while the “lesser” Chatti lived in East Friesland. The descriptions given by Ptolemy agrees with what has been reconstructed from the archaeological finds.

Depopulation of the Frisian salt-marshes occurred between 250 and 400 AD due to the rising sea levels and flooding and, undoubtedly, the cometary destruction of Europe. This resulted in an almost total depopulation of the Frisians in North Holland.

This depopulation not only affected Frisian areas. In the Baltic and northern European coastal regions, the population retreated to the higher areas inland during the second century AD. Where the Frisians went still cannot be stated with certainty. It is thought that some of them migrated to Flanders in the 3rd century, and from there crossed over to Kent in England. Frisian Tritzumer pottery has been found in both regions. Kerst Huisman has theorized that the Frisians of the flooded salt-marshes migrated to East Friesland and there, together with the Chatti, formed the tribe known as the Franks. There came into being, at any rate, a new tribe bearing the name of the Franks about the year 300 AD.

The presence of the tribe known as the Chatti has been mentioned by several ancient sources. What I find to be of great interest is that the Hittites were also known as the Chatti. And Abraham, the patriarch of the Jews, was said to have been a Hittite. That is to say, an Aryan. I began to wonder if the so-called pejorative characteristics that were historically assigned to Jews might actually be an “Aryan cultural inheritance?” It is, after all, the “Salic Law,” from the Salian Franks, that deprived women of the rights of inheritance and the position of women was seriously degraded with the impostion of monotheism through Judaism.

But, let’s stop here for a bit and go in a slightly different direction.

Above we have stated that the experts note that Frisian Tritzumer pottery has been found in Kent in England.

A definitive link between the Frisians and a tribe in England? Could it be possible that the Frisians came FROM England to the salt marshes of northern Europe?

Then, there is the bizarre belief of the ancient Armenians and Georgians that the Khazars were Gog and Magog.

What’s up with that?!

In Genesis, we find the following:

10:1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.
10:2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.
10:3 And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah.
10:4 And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.
10:5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

It’s truly interesting to note that the word “Ashkenaz” is listed as a name of one of great grandsons of Noah, through the “gentile” line. What about the “isles of the Gentiles?”

The only other real mention of Gog and Magog is in a truly weird prophecy given by the prophet Ezekiel:

38:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 38:2 Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him, 38:3 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: 38:4 And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords: 38:5 Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet: 38:6 Gomer, and all his bands; the house of Togarmah of the north quarters, and all his bands: and many people with thee.

38:7 Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them. 38:8 After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations, and they shall dwell safely all of them.

38:9 Thou shalt ascend and come like a storm, thou shalt be like a cloud to cover the land, thou, and all thy bands, and many people with thee.

38:10 Thus saith the Lord GOD; It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought:38:11 And thou shalt say, I will go up to the land of unwalled villages; I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates, 38:12 To take a spoil, and to take a prey; to turn thine hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the people that are gathered out of the nations, which have gotten cattle and goods, that dwell in the midst of the land.

38:13 Sheba, and Dedan, and the merchants of Tarshish, with all the young lions thereof, shall say unto thee, Art thou come to take a spoil? hast thou gathered thy company to take a prey? to carry away silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to take a great spoil?

38:14 Therefore, son of man, prophesy and say unto Gog, Thus saith the Lord GOD; In that day when my people of Israel dwelleth safely, shalt thou not know it? 38:15 And thou shalt come from thy place out of the north parts, thou, and many people with thee, all of them riding upon horses, a great company, and a mighty army: 38:16 And thou shalt come up against my people of Israel, as a cloud to cover the land; it shall be in the latter days, and I will bring thee against my land, that the heathen may know me, when I shall be sanctified in thee, O Gog, before their eyes.

38:17 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Art thou he of whom I have spoken in old time by my servants the prophets of Israel, which prophesied in those days many years that I would bring thee against them?

38:18 And it shall come to pass at the same time when Gog shall come against the land of Israel, saith the Lord GOD, that my fury shall come up in my face. 38:19 For in my jealousy and in the fire of my wrath have I spoken,Surely in that day there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel; 38:20 So that the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that creep upon the earth, and all the men that are upon the face of the earth, shall shake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground.

38:21 And I will call for a sword against him throughout all my mountains, saith the Lord GOD: every man’s sword shall be against his brother. 38:22 And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people that are with him, an overflowing rain, and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.

38:23 Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the LORD.

39:1 Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog, and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: 39:2 And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts, and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel: 39:3 And I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thy right hand. 39:4 Thou shalt fall upon the mountains of Israel, thou, and all thy bands, and the people that is with thee: I will give thee unto the ravenous birds of every sort, and to the beasts of the field to be devoured. 39:5 Thou shalt fall upon the open field: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.

39:6 And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD. 39:7 So will I make my holy name known in the midst of my people Israel; and I will not let them pollute my holy name any more: and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel.

Heavy duty stuff, eh? And it sure sounds like what the currently named Israelis are doing in Israel, doesn’t it? Did you notice the references to unwalled cities, and the building of a wall that would be brought down? What about the weird remark “I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts, and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel”? If the Ashkenazi are Gog and Magog, it makes perfect sense. A “sixth part” of them survived the Holocaust and came from the north to Israel…

Indeed, the Lord works in mysterious ways!!!

Even when you know how the Bible came to be written, when you read something like the passage above, it makes your skin crawl.

There’s another mention of Gog and Magog in the book of Revelation:

20:7 And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, 20:8 And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. 20:9 And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. 20:10 And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

Interestingly, the Signs Team pointed out another couple of items in Revelation to me yesterday:

2:8 And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write; These things saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive; 2:9 I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.

3:9 Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.